An industry-academic collaboration has achieved the first optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of cubic meter volumes. With OCT's ability to provide difficult-to-obtain information on material composition, subsurface structure, coatings, surface roughness and other properties, this advance could open up many new uses for OCT in industry, manufacturing and medicine. The achievement also represents important progress toward developing a high-speed, low-cost OCT system on a single integrated circuit chip. "Our study demonstrates world-record results in cubic meter volume imaging, with at least an order of magnitude larger depth range and volume compared to previous demonstrations of three-dimensional OCT," said James ...

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Our study demonstrates world-record results in cubic meter volume imaging, with at least an order of magnitude larger depth range and volume compared to previous demonstrations of three-dimensional OCT...These results provide a proof-of-principle demonstration for using OCT in this new regime...Long-range OCT is a new range of operation that requires extremely high performance light sources, integrated optical receivers and signal processing.

Research by our group at MIT and our collaborators at Praevium Research and Thorlabs indicated that the coherence length of the VCSEL source was orders of magnitude longer than other swept laser technologies suitable for OCT, which suggested the possibility of long-range OCT imaging.

"The development of OCT in the early 1990s greatly benefited from components and methods used in fiber optical communications,. And still, 25 years later, advances in the optical communications industry continue to greatly benefit OCT.

As PIC technology continues to advance, one can realistically expect full OCT systems on a single chip within the next five years, dramatically lowering the size and cost.